Do you remember the bendy concept phone that Nokia demoed last month? It allowed you to control the phone by flexing, bending and stretching. The Finnish manufacturer has peeled back another layer of their experimental project, this time releasing a demo video of one of these handsets. As interesting as the idea sounds on paper, it reeks of innovation for innovation’s sake, and doesn’t bode well for the future of the Microsoft/Nokia alliance.

The clip below shows a tear-drop shaped phone being manipulated much like a piece of clay. Pinch-to-zoom is replaced by bend-to-zoom, scroll-to-pan is now stretch-to-pan, and you no longer have to settle for merely looking at images–as this concept supposedly lets you feel images.

Nokia calls the concept HumanForm, and is framing it as the next level of emotional interaction with a device. Supposedly the physical manipulation combines with (undemonstrated) voice interaction to make technology disappear behind the scenes and let intuition take over. It’s a positively Apple-like thing to promise.

In fact, it might be too Apple-like of a thing to say. With Steve Jobs’ company rising to a dominant position in the mobile tech world over the last few years, now everyone is trying to copy their “intersection of arts and technology” formula. It’s similar to the worn-out pattern in Hollywood, where a movie is a surprising blockbuster, and then every new film for the next three years attempts to replicate what made it great. It’s as if Nokia gathered a meeting and told a bunch of engineers to anticipate the next stage of human-tech evolution, so they can beat Apple to the punch.

That’s a noble enough goal, but this tech doesn’t appear to offer the kind of evolution that anyone is going to particularly care about. Is bending a phone more personal than swiping it? Is stretching the “skin” of a bendy phone more intuitive than tapping the screen? I don’t see it.

Much of the appeal of multitouch phones and tablets comes from their displays acting as the window to another world. The display serves to establish Alice’s looking glass, and the multitouch is what lets us walk through it.

But future-y concepts like Nokia’s HumanForm misinterpret that equation. When you’re bending and twisting the phone, your focus is shifted away from that world on the other side and towards the device itself. A great smartphone or tablet gets out of the way of what you’re doing; HumanForm gets in the way. It amps up the tactile interaction, but in the process it loses the appeal of picking it up in the first place.

While flexible smartphones can eventually serve other purposes, like greater portability and damage resistance, the HumanForm interface strikes me as being just as gimmicky as the old Smell-o-vision odor projection systems that were attempted in the 1950’s. Both demonstrate that just because you can add an extra layer of sensory experience doesn’t mean that you’ll want to.

When this is added to the recent Microsoft mobile concept video, I have to wonder about the Microsoft/Nokia alliance. It appears that the two companies, both beaten to the punch by iOS and Android, are pouring their resources into futuristic concepts that say “our mobile products may not be selling now, but wait until you see the future. We’re going to be awesome then.”